People spends hours at a time with their electronic devices—computers, telephones, music players, and the like. They like best those devices that are intuitive to use and whose interactions best meet their expectations regarding how machines should work. They interact with electronics through inputs and outputs from the devices, where the outputs generally are provided audibly and/or on a flat graphical display screen, and the inputs may occur via touch screens, joysticks, mice, 4-directional keypads, and other such input mechanisms.
As mobile devices become more powerful, users interact with them more using graphical objects, such as lists of items, maps, images, and the like. The information represented by such objects may be enormous in terms of data represented, and visually very large (a detailed map of the United States would be miles wide), while the displays on mobile devices are very small. As a result, it can be a challenge to provide graphical information in sufficient detail for a user (e.g., by zooming in on one area of an object) while still giving the user a sense of space and permitting the user to move intuitively throughout the space.